In Africa and Asia, the other branch
Of the anthropoid tree—Catarrhinos,
The narrow-nosed—began the avalanche
Of primate innovation whose beginnings
Would lead, in time, to everything we are.
Catarrhinos divided into two:
Cercopithecos—the tailed ones, the star
Of the monkey world—and the apes, the few
And tailless ones whose chapter comes hereafter.
Cercopithecos—the Old World monkeys—
Were the most successful, and the rafter
Of their house was built on the keys
Of three innovations: the bilophodont molar,
The cheek pouch, and the ischial callosity—
The grinding tooth, the food-bag, and the solar
Sitting-pad of leathery generosity
That let the monkey sit on branches
For hours without discomfort—three
Modest innovations, the avalanches
Of success built on the ordinary.
Papios—the baboon—came down from the trees.
This was the revolution: the ground.
For the Miocene's drying squeezed the frieze
Of the African forest into smaller ground,
And the savanna opened—the woodland shrank,
And the baboon, too large and too social
For the diminishing trees, broke rank
With the arboreal life and the asocial
Isolation of the canopy, and walked
Into the open grassland on all fours—
Knuckle-walking, tail high, and the stalked
And open landscape of the predator's
Attention forced a new kind of society:
The troop—fifty, a hundred, two hundred strong—
The baboon's answer to the impropriety
Of the leopard and the lion and the long
And exposed savanna crossing: safety in numbers,
And in the hierarchy that the numbers
Required—the dominant male who encumbers
The front of the troop, the lumbers
And powerful sentinel whose canines
Were as long as a leopard's and whose bark
Alone could send the predator's designs
Into retreat—the patriarch's mark
Of authority was the tooth and the threat display.
And the females formed coalitions—
The matrilineal alliances' array
Of mutual grooming and the conditions
Of support: the baboon's social order
Was the grandmother's legacy—the elder
Female whose daughters' border
And granddaughters' proximity held her
Position steady through the decades,
The stable core of the troop's identity
While the males came and went like parades
Of transient authority.
Macacos—the macaque—crossed into Asia
And spread from Japan to North Africa,
The most geographically blessed—the stadia
Of the macaque's expansion, the attica
Of the monkey world: the snow monkey
Bathing in the hot springs of Japan,
The Barbary macaque's funky
And European remnant, the clan
Of the rhesus monkey whose blood
Would give the human medical science
Its Rh factor—the flood
Of the macaque's alliance
With human curiosity and research
Was the accidental partnership
Of the most adaptable monkey's perch
Beside the most adaptable ape's grip
On the world.
And Colobos—the leaf-eater—
Solved the problem of the forest's cellulose
With the ruminant's trick: a repeater
Of the stomach's chamber, the verbose
And multi-compartment foregut
That fermented leaves the way
The cow's rumen fermented grass—the strut
Of convergent evolution's display:
The same problem, the same solution,
In the monkey as in the cow—
The leaf-eating primate's contribution
To the proof that evolution's plow
Cuts the same furrow in different fields.
Honor Cercopithecos—who came down
From the trees and learned what the grassland yields
To the social, the hierarchical, the brown
And powerful baboon; who crossed into Asia
And colonized the human world before
The human did; who proved the fantasia
Of the primate can include the floor
Of the open ground and not just the canopy's height—
The monkey who walked into the savanna
And survived, and organized, and the right
Of the primate to the open manna
Of the grassland was established here,
Before the ape, before the human tread—
The monkey went first, and the frontier
Of the ground was the monkey's to have led.